10/17/2015

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CalculusProblem:IttransformsproductsintosumsArturoPresa|Brilliant

Ittransformsproductsintosums

Calculus Level5 190points

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Youanswered6.371.

A function is defined at any positive numbers, is continuous,

satisfies the previous functional equation for any positive numbers
and and
.
Find the value of

. Give your answer to 2 decimal places.

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NumberTheory
Calculus

If you think that

does not necessarily exist under the given
conditions, enter 0 as your answer.

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ArturoPresa
1day,7hoursago

13

By making
into the given functional equation we get that
any positive real number and
, we obtain that

. Then you can see that if

and therefore

is

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Now let us prove by Mathematical Induction that for any positive number
following is true

Indeed, making
we obtain that
equation given in the problem, we get that
By replacing

by

. Assuming that

in (2) we obtain that

for any positive number

and any natural number

and any natural number

the

, and using the functional

, or equivalently,
Dividing both sides by

we obtain

Now, we can prove that for any real number

First we are going to assume that

is a positive rational number, so it can be written like

where

and

are natural numbers and then using (2) and (3)

The equality (4)
is also going to be true in the case the is a negative rational number. Actually, if is a negative rational
number then using (1) and assuming that (4) is true for positive rational numbers, we obtain that
The case when
it is easily derived from the fact that
To prove that (4) is true for any real number it is enough to consider a sequence of rational
numbers
, such that
Then taking limits in both sides of
and using
the continuity of
we obtain that
This completes the proof of (4).

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10/17/2015

CalculusProblem:IttransformsproductsintosumsArturoPresa|Brilliant
The rest is very simple. If

is any real positive number, from (4) we obtain that

Therefore
is differentiable at any positive number and

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PiHanGoh
2hoursago

This is marvelous! I was skeptical at first when you intend to prove that it's differentiable
everywhere because I thought it's an impossible feat. And at first, I was confused why you
prove the case for all natural numbers , and all rational numbers because they seem so
unrelated to the question at hand and then you pull of the impossible! Thanks for the
fantastic question and answer!

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